John Udell has an interesting, though short, article on del.icio.us and Flickr and their approach to classification:
Conventional wisdom holds that people will never assign metadata tags to content. It just isn't on the path of least resistance, the story goes, and those few who do step off the path succeed only in creating unwieldy taxonomies. (Do you file the revised XML Schema specification under xml/specifications or specifications/xml? We can never agree, and many good minds are sacrificed in the vain attempt.) Yet somehow, users of Flickr and del.icio.us do routinely tag content, and those tags open new dimensions of navigation and search. It's worth pondering how and why this works.Abandoning taxonomy is the first ingredient of success. These systems just use bags of keywords that draw from --and extend --a flat namespace. In other words, you tag an item with a list of existing and/or new keywords. Of course, that idea's been around for decades, so what's special about Flickr and del.icio.us? Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. The degree to which these systems bind the assignment of tags to their use -- in a tight feedback loop -- is that kind of difference.
Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing says:
Windows error on giant Toronto animated billboard are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with "Toronto."
From the RSS in Government blog comes news that the National Hurricane Center is offering RSS feeds on tropical storm maps and forecasts
Another article, this one at Red Herring, on IM in the workplace:
A recent report by Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that 11 million people use an IM service at work, and 53 million have used it at home or in the office. But those numbers have yet to translate into a lucrative market. By the end of this year, IM conversations will generate $131 million in revenues. But by 2008, that figure is predicted to jump to $413 million, according to the Radicati Group, a technology market research company in Palo Alto, California.
Good article in NetworkWorldFusion on 'presence' as a rising killer app for collaboration:
Some say the numbers suggest that presence is well on its way to being that killer app."Just like in the late '90s when the No.1 thing on IT agendas was to Web-enable applications, I think the story of the next decade will be adding presence to applications," says Francis deSouza, president of IMLogic. "Every application can be made smarter and more efficient with presence."
The article acknowledges but doesn't address the need to manage your presence. And--I would say--your identity Sometimes you want to be 'working guy.' Sometimes you want to be 'home guy,' or 'hobby gal' or 'working on this important project that has nothing to do with anyone else person.'
I've been on vacation for the last two weeks. Had a lovely time.
Things should be getting back to regular updates real soon now...
Amy Gahran at Contentious suggests that proper grammar and punctuation on the web is evolving:
These considerations can help guide grammar and punctuation choices in your online writing:It's not print. Most formal rules of English grammar and punctuation were developed to suit written (printed) communication, and they still work very well in that environment. However, print is only one medium -- and in coming decades it may cease to be the most common communication channel in many geographic regions or sectors of society.
It's a challenging visual environment. Text and images (both visual vehicles) are the primary ways to transmit messages via computer. Unfortunately, today's computer screens remain a more difficult physical environment for reading, thanks to lower resolution, flicker, lighting, etc.
Small punctuation gets lost. Look at your keyboard -- the most commonly used English punctuation marks are small. In print, punctuation marks serve to enhance the perceived flow of words. However, on a computer screen commas, periods, semicolons, colons, apostrophes, and many other common punctuation marks are simply hard to see. Therefore, less punctuation and bigger punctuation marks are usually more effective in online content. This is why the em-dash (a long hyphen: --) tends to be used more liberally online than in print. SimSimilarly, semicolons (;) tend to be used sparingly in web content – they’re too visually innocuous to play the key structural role that they often do in print.
...via elearningpost
Microsoft and open source--it must be a sign of changing times when those words are used together...
Via Clay Shirky and Many to Many--MSFT releases FlexWiki as Open Source project:
We wrote about Microsoft’s FlexWiki project last December. Now eWeek is reporting that Microsoft is releasing FlexWiki code under an Open Source license. (Code is available on Source Forge, though it indicates that is is extensions to FlexWiki — I am not sure when or where the full codebase will be released..)
Intellectual property in the face of an increasingly digital world is a hot topic--and a complex one. Intellectual property is not the same as real property, but we've often tried to treat it as if it is. This was not an issue when there were limited ways of distributing the product of intellectual property (books, recordings, etc.), which were real, physical property and were either difficult to copy or cheap enough that they weren't worth copying. Now, we're entering an age where not only is it easy to copy intellectual products, but the ease of copying and sharing is a critical part of intellectual discussion and cultural sharing (this aspect, I think, is one that corporations involved in intellectual property discussions overlook--unlike the 'piracy' rhetoric, much 'stealing' of intellectual property isn't about money).
Currently, several organizations, including but not limited to the RIAA for record producers, are attempting to maintain their current, more or less analog, business model through litigation and legislation. How's it working? Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has a very interesting article at law.com on the effect that RIAAs litigation against file downloaders has had on file sharing:
...The campaign, coordinated by the RIAA, was a last-resort maneuver by the industry to stem the tide of P2P file-sharing, which had reached mammoth proportions. In fact, some estimates put the number of American music swappers at 60 million -- that's 9 million more than voted for President Bush.
Unfortunately, the evidence thus far suggests that the RIAA litigation campaign has had little, if any, effect on P2P file-sharing. Companies like Big Champagne and BayTSP that track the online P2P population have found that the number of U.S. file-sharers continues to grow. The global file-sharing population, moreover, is skyrocketing. A survey of Internet users undertaken by the Pew Internet and American Life Project did show a marked decline in file-sharing in the months following the highly-publicized first rounds of RIAA lawsuits, but Pew's follow-up reports have documented a rebound in the months since.
....
So what about the "carrot" of authorized music services like Apple's iTunes Music Store? In the words of the RIAA, the lawsuits are also intended to "encourage music fans to turn to these legitimate services." Well, the news there is not terribly encouraging, either. While the authorized music services are attracting a modest number of customers, it is also clear that they together account for a trivial percentage of the total number of digital music files being downloaded today. In fact, it is fair to say that all of the authorized music services together do not yet amount to a drop in the digital music-downloading bucket. Apple, the most successful of all the authorized music services, sold a total of 100 million downloads in its first 15 months of operation. This sounds impressive until it is held up against the 5 billion files that move across the Kazaa network every month.
I don't want to quote the whole thing, but there's also some interesting information about alternatives to the make-them-all-criminals approach to providing fair compensation for intellectual property (and, by the way, I think this is critical--it doesn't have to be about absolute protection of intellectual property. In an ideal world ideas and discussion of ideas would be freely shared and authors and other creative artists would be fairly compensated in ways that encouraged more ideas and discussions of ideas were freely shared).
...via BoingBoing